Father Comes Home : A Family Confronts an Aging Man’s Progressive Debilitation With Compassion and Patience

I AWAKEN IN DEAD darkness, suddenly alert. A clouded voice is calling, as if from a departing dream: “Gerry . . . I need you.”

It is Pop.

I find him tangled in his bed, unable to free himself from a urine-soaked sheet. He does not at first seem to recognize me, gazing across three decades at his youth, his eyes thick and dazed. Time hangs there, then he smiles, and the voice of the 78-year-old man quivers, “Get me out of here.”

I do that, help him strip and clean himself, then dress once more. I make no issue of his problem because he remains profoundly troubled by his incontinence, the legacy of a series of strokes. I remake his bed; he shuffles into a nearby bathroom. When he returns, there is another dazed moment, followed by a smile. My father remembers me.

And I remember him--young, wearing a white T-shirt freckled with petroleum from his job. Home from a day in the Kern River oil fields, he was rummaging through our garage, a small disaster of wires and fixtures--the trappings of a part-time electrician, his second job. Occasionally, during those years, he’d wrestle with me, our only form of physical contact, for it was difficult for him to display affection. My mother’s face was often troubled as she watched us romp. “Take it easy, Speck,” she’d urge. “You’ll get him all worked up.” Rough stuff upset her, and she always seemed fragile.

Today, despite her own health problems, my mother is resilient, residing semi-independently in a nearby mobile-home park. My father, living with us, is vulnerability itself, so stripped by brain damage that he can hide no emotion. Tears and grins come without resistance to a face once carefully controlled.

Our present arrangement is a gentle paradox. Although I was raised in a household that included aging relatives, all were from Mom’s family. Great-grandma, Uncle Tudy and Grandma lived with us during their final years and died with us. My father, who had himself left home at 13 and always seemed distant in family matters, was generous without being warm. “He was embarrassed by the way we loved one another,” my mother says now, “and jealous, so he talked rough, but he never turned anyone away.” Perhaps that is why it has never occurred to me, an only child, that my folks wouldn’t one day join us.

Not everyone feels this way. One friend asked me the other afternoon, after seeing Pop shuffle, smiling but befuddled, through a holiday party we were having, “Haven’t you been able to find a suitable nursing home for him?”

POP SOMETIMES TOOK me to work with him, introducing me to his pals as “my tax exemption,” an appellation I did not understand but liked because it was something special between us. After work, he would stop at a blue-collar beer bar to sip suds, laugh, perhaps shoot snooker. He’d buy me a soft drink and allow me to sip the foam from his draft.

There was mild irony in his satisfaction with that gang because my father had attended UCLA and felt intense, festering dissatisfaction at not having graduated, at having been consigned to blue-collar work. He rarely talked about his college experience, not to me, at least. It was a disappointment so deep that it had to be buried, like the souvenirs of his All-American football years he kept buried in a chest in his room.

He does not, however, bury his affection for the girl I married. Jan’s every attention pleases him now, and as a result I am beginning to comprehend the great breadth of her love as we care for this difficult old man. I am also seeing my adolescent children grow and change, putting their rebellions aside to comfort Grandpa, then picking them up again to deal with us. A boy who drips teen-age condescension at Jan and me, curling his lip in anger, prepares his grandfather’s lunch and then patiently sits with the ailing man, helping him eat. He does this without pay, without coercion and without complaint.

This is true in part because Jan and I do the great bulk of work involving my dad, and distribute other tasks so that no individual is overburdened. But there is more: Since Grandpa joined us last fall, we have seen elements of compassion, responsibility and maturity not previously manifested in our children. Last Friday, we took the night off and attended a concert. When we returned home, Garth and Carlos were both grinning at my dad’s latest effort to get attention. “Grandpa came out in his underpants and said ‘Tighten my belt,’ ” Garth explained. “We gave him some ice cream, then put him back to bed.” His smile was genuine, his voice reflective.

Most of our friends have been strongly supportive--actually exaggerating the difficulty of our situation. A few, however, seem to consider our new familial arrangement an implicit indictment of their own. “We’re taking care of ourselves ,” a friend volunteered with quivering chin not long ago, explaining her decision to distance herself from her aging mother, who was dying of cancer. It was a heartfelt cry of pain, for I knew that her mother lived in a nursing home.

Such responses are understandable. Our society has increasingly faced dying and death, but progressive debilitation remains a wilderness. Several years ago, when it appeared that prostate cancer would kill my father, our family talked about death, its inevitability and consequences. We were prepared. Now a more ominous truth hovers before my children’s eyes and ours: Grandpa’s slow unraveling--that bright, tough man coming apart before our eyes.

Arthritis forced Pop to retire 15 years ago. Today, although he retains the thick trunk that once carried efficient musculature, the muscles themselves are gone--atrophied, ravaged, emptied. Gone is the leonine grace he had as a young man, capable of performing almost any physical feat. Yesterday, he shuffled uncertainly into the front yard and asked if he could help us. I handed him a rake and for a quarter hour he carefully groomed a three-foot area until, in the manner of those suffering from neurological disorders, he worked his way into a position he could not change and gradually grew stiff as a statue. He did not request help, but raged profanely at the body that has failed him. I eased him into a comfortable stance, thanked him, then made him a cup of coffee.

I see the sum of my father’s life when I look at him, and that is difficult for my children. They tend to view old age as a static state: Gramps was always old and they’ve always been young. But slowly, certainly, as they read old press clippings or view old photographs--”That’s Grandpa? He was cute”--slowly, certainly, life’s inexorability and death’s inevitability become real. We’re in this together.

We are by no means martyrs. Our situation is eased by the fact that we have help five days a week, so our work schedules have been little altered by Pop. Our kids have undergone the greatest change--they not only attend their grandfather but have also endured some dislocation without protest. Carlos had to switch rooms so Pop could be ensconced close to the master bedroom, and my daughter Simone has moved in with her grandmother.

They do not protest, but they do study us. There are moments when I see one of them gazing from me to grandpa and back while I am helping my dad or, more significantly, when I am fighting my own resentment at work delayed or intimacy interrupted by him. My parents, my children, my wife and I are exploring some secret chambers. Our lives are deeply entwined and my mother, with more than a touch of irony, tells my wife: “Gerry always wanted to be Speck’s boy. Now he’s got his wish.”

If this family’s experience is at all typical, it may suggest that, as a society, we are losing a vital aspect of human relationships if we don’t see lives through to their conclusions. There are lessons being learned in our house now, and no one is lecturing.

Pop shuffles into the living boom; this is one of his bad days, one of his addled ones, and he is trying to pull red pajama bottoms on over his trousers. “Dad,” Simone asks with sudden gravity, “will that happen to you?”

“It could, hon,” I reply, not telling her that she has touched my great fear. “It could happen to any of us.”

Life is full of cycles and circles. I was a bed-wetter as a child and my father had been embarrassed--”We can’t take him anywhere ,” he told my mother when I was 7 or 8 years old, looking away from me as he spoke. I plotted vengeance then for the humiliation I attributed to him. Well, now’s my chance, but all I want to do is to take care of him, make what’s left of his life as pleasant as it can be, and I have allies in that quest.

Last night when I tucked Pop into bed, I gave his feet a sharp tug before I said good night, and he giggled.

Welcome home, Pop.